Are business collaborations worth it?

Collaboration, partnerships and coalitions seem to be buzzwords in the business world as companies seek to have a global appeal.There is a deliberate drive for companies to develop global connections. The past few years have seen barriers being broken down, interconnections increasing more than ever before and hunting grounds extended beyond a company’s borders.Some companies have even dared to venture into area that they used to shun not so many years ago.

The business dipping bowl has become bigger as the barriers in languages and cultures are broken.

That has been one of the positive change that has been brought a multicurrency system.

Most managers are now caught up in meetings, teleconferencing, video calls inputting to woo investors into their company or striking a supply/buyer agreement and ironing out inter linkages.

For some companies, these partnerships have created more opportunities and opened wider markets with benefits accruing exceptionally.

But businesses have had to ask themselves if all these collaborations are worth it, if businesses have not been over focusing on external issues instead of focusing on internal key production areas.

But again we have to scrutinise how many people are involved in mapping out these partnerships, the amount to time going over all the details about their potential market, the culture, consumer behaviours, legislation, political issues, with a fine comb,.

It takes a lot of time to gather these facts and streamline it with your company’s objectives. Some operations have been stalled as a result of differences in positions and considerations over wastage of resources.

Companies usually start with minimal staff managing an operation and increase the number of dedicated staff as they go along depending on their capabilities.

The going back and forth in finding information may affect the organisations capacity to serve other departments and areas that are not totally focused on the expansion drive.

If your organisation is interested in mooting some sort of partnerships, you have got to realise that much of your work is centred on effectively communicating.

A lot of discussions involved in collaborations may be telephonic or through instant social delivery vehicles.

Most of these mediums rely purely on trust as business partners try to work it out together. Partnerships thrive on keeping each other informed, being afraid of communicating issues will not be good for the collaboration

Partnerships have been known to be fail if ongoing communication is not kept as watertight as it should be.

Ongoing discussions should be heightened as much as possible. Excessive communication must be encouraged, they are the oil of these collaborations.

Any hiccup in communication has the potential of crippling the collaboration and ultimately rendering it void.

Collaborations efforts have been stalled by lack of role planning. There is no way you can be doing the same roles, each individual or group have to be responsible for a different management role.

Overlapping of roles is strongly discouraged. And perhaps if you thought perfect partnerships exist you may need to rethink.

It takes a lot of time to create the trust and figure out how to perfect the partnership. What makes it more complicated is that a lot of things change over time, there is no constancy, it is therefore important for two sides to go on and explore at the ways that you may move towards the same goal.

Some have described these coalitions as necessities in paving way for innovation. Managers are keen to build connections between companies and speciality areas.

If it was not for collaborations, some of the technology improvements would not have been made though. Open markets allow different users worldwide to tap into a common shared resource.

To create the conditions that support innovation, leaders need to build connections across companies, industries, and sectors.

It’s only by joining forces across sectors that some projects can be executed. Recently our Private Public partnerships have been helpful in finding helpful economic information.

It takes more than one company to raise an effective project. Isolation has never been an effective way of ensuring that you become more relevant.

Collaborations for some have been a necessary evil, under one big umbrella, an organisation can be so much effective.

It’s a lot of hard work to keep coalitions in place and keep both parties engaged to work for a common good. There must however be an underlying common goal.

You can choose to have partial collaboration efforts by not dragging the entire organisation with you.

If that part is successful you can then work towards strengthening other areas towards that shared vision.

Shelter Chieza is a Management Consultant. She holds over a decade of Management Experience. She can be contacted at [email protected]